How to Win the Cartoon Caption Contest

The most common question we get about The New Yorker’sCartoon Caption Contest is “Why didn’t I win?” Well, in all probability, probability played a big part. So far there have been 1,449,697 entries and 254 winners. So, roughly, that puts the odds at 10,000:1.

Entering the Cartoon Caption Contest is like getting married again: it’s the triumph of hope over experience. Let me add, though, being married for a third time, that I think that’s a good thing.

But hope can always use help (ask Obama), so let me provide some advice: come up with lots of captions for each cartoon before you winnow down to the one you want to submit.

See, you can’t come up with a funny caption if you don’t come up with any captions at all. Therefore, the first thing to do is to lower the bar. Lower it to the ground, so you can step over it and generate as many potential captions as possible. You can always raise it later.

The easiest way to do this is by using the words that immediately pop into your head as a jumping-off point for your captions. For example, when I look at this Danny Shanahan drawing (from Contest #55)

here are the words and the captions that immediately spring to mind:

Chicken: “Who you callin’ chicken?”

Duck: “Hey, I’m not duck soup.”

Couch: “Quick, duck behind the couch.”

Lips: “Oops, we don’t have lips.”

Sex: “Let’s have hot monkey sex.”

Feather: “Am I just a feather in your cap?”

Migrate: “Not tonight, I have a migrate headache.”

Bird flu: “Have you been tested?”

Chicks: “I bet you say that to all the chicks.”

Children: “How will we raise the children?”

With caption writing, more is more, and that quantity is the road to quality. Well, I could go on, and then on and on, but once again I see the ghost of E. B. White:

So, at this point, I think I’ll let the frog go. Who knows—maybe he’ll get something going with a squirrel. Could be funny!

Bob Mankoff was the cartoon editor of The New Yorker from 1997 to 2017.

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As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.